Not my budget!

Banner drop at Quinpool RBC

$22 million of taxpayers' money for RBC, but no money for the poor, students, or even for dental work for children. That's wrong, says a group of young Nova Scotians who dropped a banner of the Quinpool Road RBC this morning to make that point. Photo contributed.

KJIPUKTUK (Halifax) - This morning a group calling itself Concerned Youth of Nova Scotia did a banner drop off the roof of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) on Quinpool Road.

In a statement emailed to the Halifax Media Co-op and other news outlets the group takes issue with the $22 million in payroll rebates offered up to RBC by the Nova Scotia government.

Meanwhile this year's provincial budget contained numerous cuts to services, and will allow universities to raise tuition beyond a 3 percent cap, the group complains.

“The Liberals are cutting all of these services that actually need support yet they dole out 22 million to RBC, a company that posted record profits last year. We have had enough of this hypocrisy and are voicing our opinion through a banner we have hung off the RBC on Quinpool Road,” the email states.

“The Liberal Government is throwing away this province's greatest assets by gutting the film tax credit and slashing the budget to organizations doing crucial work protecting the most vulnerable in our society. They are pushing away a generation of youth by encouraging universities to charge whatever they want and they are starving our health system to death, even going so far as to cut funding for children’s dental work,” says the email.

“The Liberal government is showing us that as long as they are in power our province will not prosper. We have learned the hard way that cobbling together a living is as good as it gets here, even during a time when our province produces three times as much wealth as it did in the 1970s. We ask Minister Whalen, where does that extra wealth go?”

“We will not accept a death of a thousand cuts from government austerity. We hope you won’t either,” the email concludes.